Obama’s Endless War

I am issuing a challenge here to all SWJ readers and commenters to seriously attempt to challenge me in my comment……

Obama has never intended to defeat IS….WHY do I say that …..if we all remember the Obama press conference where he inadvertently stated that he “has no strategy BUT is working on one”…..followed by the extremely insightful WaPo article “claiming he is winning against IS with a great strategy WHICH we common folk simply did not understand thus we “needed more messaging”…..followed by the threats issued by DoS Kerry to the anti Assad opposition to surrender to Putin’s demands.

Followed by the now infamous Goldberg interview where he publicly stated disdain for the ME particular anything Sunni….in favor of the state sponsor since 1979 of terrorism……Iran…

Some really smart individuals here at SWJ have often stated in order to defeat IS it has to be done by the Syrians and Iraqi’s themselves with the US assisting….that is the boots needed on the ground…

BUT then we have Obama, CENTCOM, DoD, and CIA suddenly supporting the Kurds against IS, then he have a ludicrous debate by Obama and Kerry over who is a “moderate” in the anti Assad opposition ALL BTW to avoid making any decisions…..AND now we have a true US proxy SDF/YPG/PKK (a US named terrorist group) fighting against a sometime US proxy FSA…WHO has actually been taking the fight to IS over the last three years on their territory with virtually no assistance from the US WHO Obama claims to be in the fight to win against IS……

THEN the US restricts TOWs to force FSA to negotiate with a genocidal dictator….then restricts MANPADs which is urgently needed against the genocidal air strikes by both Assad and Putin…and the restrictions go on and on…….let’s not even discuss the Obama lack of understanding as to what the terms “genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing” mean……

Over the last two days there has been intensive fighting between IS and FSA where a ton of clear IS targets for the US AF have been just sitting there……AND where was the US AF and WHERE is the so called Obama “we are beating IS into the ground”…comments……NOTHING.

This is from the field concerning this particular fighting that is still ongoing as I write this……

QUOTE:
Have just chatted with somebody who ‘spent some time in the area’, lately.

Word is, there’s a gang of Christian Intruder Apes (if you know what I mean..) BS-itting around and sticking their noses wherever they only can. Turks asked for lease of Reapers and similar stuff, they said ‘nyet’; but then deployed 15 of ‘wild things’ at Incirlik; only to make next to no use of them: they’re just flying around the whole day, burning fuel for nothing, more disturbing than providing any kind of help.

Lately ‘they’ came to the idea to ‘offer’ deployment of US Army’s HILMARs systems, which Turks never asked for (why should they? they’re perfectly capable of hitting back on Daesh). But nah, ‘must be’.

Ironically, to call patterns of Daesh’s rocket attacks on Turkish border-towns/villages ‘quite interesting’ would be an understatement. At least it leaves one bamboozled about who’s actually collecting intel on whom, there…

And of course, after all the success of the Mare’a OR, ‘they’ impressed themselves upon the place. Ever since, it’s a total screw-up, mildly experessed: now the people and units are sent each other direction, just not where they would make sense…

Bottom line: this stinks after some megalomaniac who thinks he must impress himself upon everybody else, and ‘be there’… if for no other reason, then ‘for the f… of it’.

Worst yet: it could be that things were developing so well, that DC simply can’t tolerate that. Just imagine the ‘shock and awe’ at Capitol Hill if it turns out the same ‘farmers, pharmacists, doctors’ that were the first of all to fight – and to defeat – the Daesh, turn out are better anti-Daesh fighters than all the beloved Kurds combined…

So, as said: women and children first. It’s Syrians, and they’re all Jihadist rats. Who cares…
UNQUOTE:

So again the challenge to any and all SWJ readers and commenters….prove me wrong …..that there is no functioning Obama anti IS strategy whatsoever in Syria and that he really does not care about genocide in Syria and ACTUALLY he is far more supportive of Assad and Putin FP and he wants us to not see that so he unleashes an uncontrolled Kerry on an impossible Geneva mission as Putin is not in the slightest interested in a “political settlement” just as he is not interested in one in eastern Ukraine.

Have come to the sad conclusion that the Obama WH and Kerry have done more in five years to destroy over 70 odd years of FP in the ME than any previously sitting US President.

Now prove me wrong……

This is exactly why the Obama WH has totally failed in fighting IS……

Charles Lister ‎@Charles_Lister
Here, our YPG allies parade the corpses of our other FSA allies in N Aleppo

What a mess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27MhszfaW1U …

One US proxy supported by the CIA and CENTCOM fighting against another US half way supported proxy…BUT NOT against IS which is the core reason YPG was to be supported….BUT in this case YPG is revealing their terrorist closeness to the PKK……

AS YPG has been largely fighting totally against FSA supported by Russian CAS and IS in combined attacks on FSA…..

NOW explain that to the American public….as a major win against IS…

Outlaw below said:

“Have come to the sad conclusion that the Obama WH and Kerry have done more in five years to destroy over 70 odd years of FP in the ME than any previously sitting US President. Now prove me wrong……”

What appears to be a different opinion:

WHEN David Kilcullen, a young Australian army officer who had been seconded to America’s State Department as a counter-terrorism strategist, arrived in Baghdad’s Green Zone in late 2005 he found himself at “Ground Zero for the greatest strategic screw up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia”. Just as it is said that the first world war was the calamity from which sprang all the other calamities of the 20th century, so too was the bungled aftermath of the invasion of Iraq the screw-up from which all other screw-ups followed … ”

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21694981-mistakes-made-islamic-state

Bill C…we are getting to much into the weeds..let’s stay on whether Obama is in fact “winning his war”……

If this is correct and I am assuming it is confirmed as the source is solid…THEN we can pack in the US FP and literally go home…this is just how bad Obama has retrenched…..absolutely no leverage and that is the first time in over 70 years……

“The Americans asked for Aleppo to be included, but the Russians refused.” – Security source tells @AFP #Syria

Footage coming out of Aleppo right now is undoubtedly one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen. Without a doubt and I have been reporting from the ME for years,

REMEMBER when Assad had his interview and he stated he would recapture the entire country…and he was not chastised by the Russians…WHY …they both want the same end state and the Obama WH cannot see their nose if they tried. If it was a snake they would have been bitten years ago.

Is Obama and Kerry truly interested in defeating IS or are they just in it for the “going through the motions until January 2017″….

Rebels lost Khirbat Tel Sha‘īr, Khalfatli, Baghidin, the gas plant, Qarah Mazr’ah, Qarah Kubri, Dalhah and Al-Mazra’ah as-Suda since yday.

Situation for rebels along the Syr-Tur border is catastrophic.
Map shows #ISIS gains during last 24 hours.

NOT a single effort by both Turkey and the US to assist FSA in pushing back against a strong IS counter offensive…..high number of IS targets are available BUT it appears that Turkey and especially the US is not interested in damaging and or degrading IS….

Apparently all this Obama Kerry talk is just talk when it comes to actually attacking constantly IS….

Bill…now back to my major complaint with Obama and his endless war or better yet a none engagement of IS……

Go back to the SWJ WaPo article where the Obama WH argued that in fact their Syrian/IS strategy was working…it was just you and me we “did not get it” and you and me “just needed MORE messaging” in order to “get it”…..

When it is all said and done and the historians get their hands on the Obama period you will be wondering just “how much messaging we have been fed by this WH”…..and we are the people who put him in office…..

REFERENCE this messaging campaign of the Obama WH…..directed against Us citizens……

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?smid=tw-share

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became
Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru

How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.

By DAVID SAMUELSMAY 5, 2016

Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. He saw the planes hit the towers, an unforgettable moment of sheer disbelief followed by panic and shock and lasting horror, a scene that eerily reminded him, in the aftermath, of the cover of the Don DeLillo novel “Underworld.”

Everything changed that day. But the way it changed Ben Rhodes’s life is still unique, and perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction. He was in the second year of the M.F.A. program at N.Y.U., writing short stories about losers in garden apartments and imagining that soon he would be published in literary magazines, acquire an agent and produce a novel by the time he turned 26. He saw the first tower go down, and after that he walked around for a while, until he ran into someone he knew, and they went back to her shared Williamsburg apartment and tried to find a television that worked, and when he came back outside, everyone was taking pictures of the towers in flames. He saw an Arab guy sobbing on the subway. “That image has always stayed with me,” he says. “Because I think he knew more than we did about what was going to happen.” Writing Frederick Barthelme knockoffs suddenly seemed like a waste of time.

“I immediately developed this idea that, you know, maybe I want to try to write about international affairs,” he explained. “In retrospect, I had no idea what that meant.” His mother’s closest friend growing up ran the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which then published Foreign Policy. He sent her a letter and included what would wind up being his only piece of published fiction, a short story that appeared in The Beloit Fiction Journal. It was titled “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back.” The story still haunts him, he says, because “it foreshadowed my entire life.”

It’s the day of President Obama’s final State of the Union address, Jan. 12, and the news inside the White House is not good. Luckily, the reporters on the couch in the West Wing waiting room don’t know it yet. The cream of the crop are here this early p.m. for a private, off-the-record lunch with the president, who will preview his annual remarks to Congress over a meal that is reported to be among the best in the White House chef’s repertoire.

“Blitzer!” a man calls out. A small figure in a long navy cashmere overcoat turns around, in mock surprise.

“You don’t write, you don’t call,” Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchorman, parries.

“Well, you can call,” shoots back his former colleague Roland Martin. Their repartee thus concluded, they move on to the mutually fascinating subject of Washington traffic jams. “I used to have a 9:30 hit on CNN,” Martin reminisces. “The office was 8.2 miles from my home. It took me 45 minutes.” The CBS News anchor Scott Pelley tells a story about how members of the press destroyed the lawn during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and were told that they would be allowed back once the grass was replanted. The National Park Service replanted the grass outside the White House, but the journalists weren’t allowed back on the lawn.

Unnoticed by the reporters, Ben Rhodes walks through the room, a half-beat behind a woman in leopard-print heels. He is holding a phone to his ear, repeating his mantra: “I’m not important. You’re important.”

The Boy Wonder of the Obama White House is now 38. He heads downstairs to his windowless basement office, which is divided into two parts. In the front office, his assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and his deputy, Ned Price, are squeezed behind desks, which face a large television screen, from which CNN blares nonstop. Large pictures of Obama adorn the walls. Here is the president adjusting Rhodes’s tie; presenting his darling baby daughter, Ella, with a flower; and smiling wide while playing with Ella on a giant rug that says “E Pluribus Unum.”

For much of the past five weeks, Rhodes has been channeling the president’s consciousness into what was imagined as an optimistic, forward-looking final State of the Union. Now, from the flat screens, a challenge to that narrative arises: Iran has seized two small boats containing 10 American sailors. Rhodes found out about the Iranian action earlier that morning but was trying to keep it out of the news until after the president’s speech. “They can’t keep a secret for two hours,” Rhodes says, with a tone of mild exasperation at the break in message discipline.

As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. The president and Rhodes communicate “regularly, several times a day,” according to Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, who is known for captaining a tight ship. “I see it throughout the day in person,” he says, adding that he is sure that in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the day via email and phone calls. Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American relations with Cuba after a hiatus of more than 50 years and has been a co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. “Every day he does 12 jobs, and he does them better than the other people who have those jobs,” Terry Szuplat, the longest-tenured member of the National Security Council speechwriting corps, told me. On the largest and smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes.

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.

Part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.

Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.

Rhodes logs into his computer. “It’s the middle of the [expletive] night in Iran,” he grumbles. Price looks up from his keyboard to provide a messaging update: “Considering that they have 10 of our guys in custody, we’re doing O.K.”

With three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of the Union address. I peek over his shoulder, to get a sense of the meta-narrative that will shape dozens of thumb-suckers in the days and weeks to follow. One sentence reads: “But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.” He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing with his edit. “Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages — they pose an enormous danger to civilians; they have to be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence.”

Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going that Rhodes and the president have been formulating together over the past seven years.

CONTINUED…………

No amount of “messaging” can cover up the massive killing of IFPs today in Syria….WHICH reflects a total Obama FP failure as the safe zones were recommended to him years ago ..AND he said no then and again this week…..then the massive killing of defenseless civilians in an IDP camp………

Obama: Syria safe zone is a “practical problem”.
Couple of days later..
White House: no excuse for air strike on Syria refugee camp.

For what it’s worth, IMO, President Obama’s understanding of the strategic nature of ISIL is FAR more accurate than that of Mr. West.

I can see Mr. West’s point if this were a Clausewitzian conflict between the US and ISIL (and if ISIL were not the government of what is possibly the weakest state on the planet throwing pathetic threats at the strongest state on the planet); but that is simply not the case. Do not apply Clausewitz to every problem, but do heed his sage advice, Mr. West: “Know what kind of war you are in.” Or, when a political conflict is perhaps not really war at all…

I would also direct Mr. West to a particularly relevant insight from Sun Tzu:
“Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy. Next best is to disrupt his alliances by diplomacy. The next best is to attack his army. And the worst policy is to attack cities.”

“Thus, those skilled in war subdue the enemy’s army without battle. They capture the enemy’s cities without assaulting them and overthrow his state without protracted operations. Their aim is to take all under heaven intact by strategic considerations. Thus, their troops are not worn out and their gains will be complete. This is the art of offensive strategy.”

What Sun Tzu advices is essentially what the President meant when he told the Generals and Admirals across the river to “defeat ISIL” – but what was sent in the spirit of Sun Tzu, was heard in the dogma of Western Clausewitz/Jomini based doctrine. The Generals (and their like-minded pundits like Mr. West) are frustrated that they have been given little of what they would need to impose a defeat in the terms they have interpreted the President’s guidance. Perhaps they should ponder what type of defeat they might be able to effect with what they have been given? Particularly if they consider their mission in the context of the resources, authorities and permissions they have been given, it becomes clear that they must first step back and reframe how they think about the problem and then seek a victory in the context of that advised by Sun Tzu.

ISIL is employing a UW strategy. Counter the strategy, Generals. To simply attack the forces and seek to take their cities is folly, and is specifically what the President told you NOT to do. If anyone deserves to be frustrated with this campaign, it is not the Generals, it is the President.

It is not too late to turn this around. But the longest journey begins with the first step, and we have yet to take that step.

Outlaw:

From COL Joseph J. Collins’ “More Lessons from a Long War” Small War Journal article of today:

“In future campaigns, when angry politicians call for American troops to take Raqqa or assault Mosul, the proper response to those advocating U.S. “boots on the ground” should be: “then what?” Keep asking that question until your interlocutor can explain how risky military operations will lead to some sort of effective governance. This will be a tough issue for a liberated Mosul and an even tougher issue for Raqqa in civil war-torn Syria.”

(See the concluding paragraph of his added “Lesson 1.”)

Note: COL Collins’ “then what” question appears to mirror a similar question posed by the spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Ms. Maria Zakharova, in 2015:

“The problem is that the West cannot show one example of how they would manage the Syria story right after,” Ms. Zakharova said. “What is the West planning to do right after? Do they have a magic wand that will transform Syria from civil war to economic prosperity?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/world/europe/russia-answers-us-criticism-over-military-aid-to-syria.html

I’m sorry Outlaw I don’t buy it.

The threat from the extreme far-right is just domestic politics. Look at the implosion of the conservative political voice in the US as a consequence of a Right-wing loud-mouthed property flipper who considers himself the true voice of the GOP. It is just a matter of time before it all blows over. The people will speak and the GOP will have to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on. Hopefully somewhat wiser from the experience.

You have spent a great of time describing the 8 stages of non-linear warfare the Russians have been directing at NATO and the EU so I don’t accept a law-enforcement issue ala Red Brigade, Baader Meinhoff, Action Direct etc. or the political implications the far-right poses is remotely as pressing as the implications the slaughter that is currently underway in Syria has regards the security of the EU.
The strategic threat posed by the actors responsible for Syria – directed at Europe in general, and Germany in particular, suggests to me the failure in political leadership is first and foremost in the 28 Capitals of those countries under direct threat i.e. Berlin, Paris, London, Warsaw, Kiev etc. and the apathy of the general populations that inhabit those 28 EU nation-states.

A combined EU/Turkish army would have much more resources than any US expeditionary force and an unlimited number of recruits. Needless to say the acceptance of a European led/equipped prominently Muslim Army would have significant advantages over the past two US dominated efforts.

The message of such a show of intent need not be complex. Assad, the Fruitcake, the Mad Mullahs and all their cronies leave Syria or face invasion by a million-man conventional Army.

I dare suggest the no-brainer advantages of a EU / Turk Army massed on the Syrian border waxes much of the thinking within the WH. So I’ll pose the question to you again. Why aren’t the folks enjoying the sunshine on the Unter Der Linden talking about how best to send their children to Turkey and face the need to fight to defend the EU way of life?

Wer fur Auftragstaktik?

RC

RC……taken from the Syrian 2016 thread that indicates that the so called Obama/Kerry highly touted successful Syrian/IS defeat strategy that is actually driving the moderate and non affiliated Syrians into the arms of JaN (AQ) and IS……

That cannot be the Obama strategy???? You will notice it is all about delivery of weapons, supplies and funds……

RC…you will notice the comment that while the FSA and their affiliates are struggling to get supplies and weapons WHILE JaN is not regardless of what Obama and DoD is saying….

Notice the comments on the combat learning abilities of JaN as they roll up victory after victory against the IRGC…..

Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09 View Post
Exchange by CrowBat…..

Rebels have proven best way 2 defeat pro-Regime forces is fighting by uniting own forces & opening several fronts. “Regime” is less flexible

Not really. It is rather so that Oblabla has managed to convince mainstream/moderate insurgents, that the best way of fighting this war is to join Jihadists of the JAN: the latter are receiving supplies undisturbed, all the time.

Compare this with Oblabla’s practice of all the time curbing the flow of supplies to insurgents….

Thanks to him – and his cooperation with Putler – within a month or so it’s really going to become ‘impossible’ to distinguish mainstream/moderates from the JAN…

Anyway, the operation in southern Aleppo is run by the JAF (Jaysh al-Fateh), which is reconstituted, that’s right: but now officially consisting only of the JAN’s and Jund al-Aqsa’s Jihadists, and the Ahrar ash-Sham – i.e. Wahhabists and Salafists, respectivelly.

The recently reinforced Faylaq ash-Sham – which is meanwhile also ‘rather Islamist than mainstream’ – might be participating too, at least in supportive function (primarily with its artillery).

BTW, below a very interesting reconstruction of how the JAF isolated the Liwa Fatimioun in Khan Touman and then destroyed a large part of this IRGC formation. After bushwacking Liwa Fatimioun in this style, on 5 May, the JAF went and bushwacked the newly-arrived Liwa Mazandaran (IRGC regulars from the 25th Kerbala Division IRGC) in al-Hmerah (NE from Khan Touman), yesterday, too.

If correct, it’s an indication of the JAF’s HQ learning a lot – from the IRGC. Namely, that’s the way the IRGC used to operate against Iraqi Army, back in the mid- and late 1980s, or against the JAN and Daesh in Syria of late 2013. It only seems that IRGC’s new arrivals are simply not of the same sort like it’s original cadre of ‘advisors’ in Syria: meanwhile they’re better at ‘playing incompetent Assadists’.

There have been some who have proposed something similar to a Syrian and IS strategy largely ignored by the Obama WH……..

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ex….epWSSToX.dpuf

EXCLUSIVE: US drone strike in Syria killed mediator trying to rein in al-Qaeda –

TWO key portions of a long article well worth reading and asking why did this not come from the NSC and or WH……

Empowering hardliners

Similar efforts to rein in al-Qaeda’s Syria branch through co-opting “moderate” members was suggested last year by retired US Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus.

In 2006, Petraeus was in charge of US military operations in Iraq when Americans started paying Sunni groups, some of whom had previously fought the US, to cut ties with and fight al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the “Anbar awakening”.

Two years later, Petraeus told politicians in Washington that the strategy had reduced US casualties, increased security and saved money.

The question in Syria, he told CNN in September, was “whether it might be possible at some point to peel off so-called ‘reconcilables’ who would be willing to renounce Nusra and align with the moderate opposition (supported by the US and the coalition) to fight against Nusra, ISIL, and Assad”.

Both Nusra and Gamaa al-Islamiyya’s designations by the US as terrorist groups would make it difficult – if not impossible – for the US to engage or use someone like Taha directly as a go-between.

But Robert Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria and a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute in Washington, says the US should be talking with Islamist groups who are not on the list, including Ahrar, which advocate that Syrians should decide how their country is ruled in the future.

Ford, who wrote about this strategy last year, said he had given this advice to high-level policy makers, including US President Barack Obama, repeatedly.

“The smart American policy is to engage with groups like Ahrar and Jaish al-Islam that, in turn, are able to peel people away from Nusra and bring them into groups that accept that there must ultimately a political process to decide the future of Syria’s political governance,” Ford told MEE.

MEE contacted the US State Department, Department of Defence and the Centcom military command to comment on Taha’s death and ask whether the US should be considering a strategy similar to that advocated by Petraeus and Ford.

The State Department referred questions to the Department of Defence which did not respond, nor did Centcom.

Quote:
Distrust of Islamists

Ford said he believes the Obama administration, including policy makers and some analysts advising them, has not attempted this approach because it has “an instinctual distrust of Islamists”.

“They have an inability to understand what is a jihadi versus what is a Salafi versus what is a Muslim brother,” he said.

“They don’t see any way for Assad to be removed and so their inclination – if forced to choose between Assad and Islamists – they’ll just go with something secular like Assad, mainly out of instinct.”

And while the US may have listed Nusra and Gamaa al-Islamiyya as terrorist organisations, Hassan, the Chatham House fellow, said regional backers of the groups are interested in supporting the kind of work Taha attempted to accomplish.

“The Americans are not on the same page,” he said.

“[The US military] doesn’t think about what Petraeus thinks. That’s not their strategy. Their strategy is to kill as many of these people as possible, disrupt the leadership, and prevent any sort of coalitions.

“They want to just basically disperse jihadists whenever and wherever they find them.”

Meanwhile, the lack of nuanced understanding, at least publicly, of the differences between Islamists in Syria drives militants to further extremes, said the sources familiar with Taha’s trip. His killing, they said, is an example of the exact ramifications of this broadbrush policy.

“Now after this air strike,” said one of the sources, “basically we empowered the hardliners. I am not even sure the US knew who exactly was in the car.”

“I’m sure [Taha] was not a friend of the US and the US was not a friend of him,” said the fighter. But with Taha’s mission in Syria “there were common interests”.

“What would you like to face – an Islamist group that believes in a national project and a Syria after the war, or do you want to face a group with a global ideology?”